1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus allowing a user to store and retrieve electronic data.
2. Related Art
It has long been known that human memory (or recollection) can be stimulated through smells, sounds and tangible mementos which are associated with an event or experience which is to be remembered. For this reason it has long been commonplace for people to buy souvenirs or mementos while on holiday and to keep a gift or a found object as a focus for their memories of an experience, event or special occasion. Subsequent exposure to the memento can effectively link memories of the event or occasion.
Of course it has long been common for people to take photographs at such events or occasions, as a means of “capturing” the event in a more tangible way than simply through memory. Those of an organised or careful disposition will create photo albums of selected images of the event, labelled and stored in a known location. Others will simply amass a large collection of sets of photographs, unsorted and unlabelled, the collection being distributed around the house. One of the assumed advantages of digital photography or digitally-stored photography is that it is easier to create an indexed archive of images, which can be quickly searched to retrieve any desired stored image. Although this is possible, the reality is that it is easier in a conventional computer system to lose stored images simply because they are not stored in the expected place.
Currently, it is conventional for a user to call up electronic files such as digital photographs—other types of files such as those of video clips, sound recordings, websites, email, SMS messages and the like—on a computer system by using software commands—in a typical Microsoft Windows™ set-up for instance, files can be retrieved using Windows Explorer™ software. Alternatively the user could search for a file using keywords. A user could therefore retrieve the electronic files associated with his holiday by going to an exact location on his computer system or by searching with, it will be hoped, the appropriate and correct keywords associated with the said files.
There are a variety of methods to retrieve electronic files, but they will generally require the user to have some knowledge of what he is looking for. If he has forgotten the location—or the existence—of a particular electronic file, that file could be “lost” within the computer system. This problem is made worse in computer systems comprising separate devices but which are linked for example by a network such as a Local Area Network, or the Internet. The process of recalling and retrieval therefore depends greatly on the user's recollection and knowledge of his computer system, and human memory typically deteriorates with time. Furthermore, computer files are easily, and often are, moved even within a single computer system set up. In addition to problems of accuracy, using electronic search parameters to describe an event is seldom intuitive, for the reasons discussed above.
It would therefore be advantageous to be able to locate, organise and retrieve electronic files associated with a certain event, in an intuitive manner, such as by the computer system's recognition of a physical token with which the electronic files have been linked.
One known approach to facilitating the location and retrieval of stored data is described in a white paper titled “The Memory Box” by Frolich et. al. of the Hewlett Packard Printing Imaging Technologies Laboratory dated 9 Aug. 2000. This approach involves the application of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to mementoes or tokens. A user stores related data, for example, digital photographs, scanned documents, emails, sound files in a directory or directories in a computer system, and uses an RFID as a “key” whose identity is captured when the data is stored (or when they are associated together) if some or all are already stored. The memento or token should be something which the user will readily associate with the event to which the data relates. The apparatus recognises and responds to the information contained in the RFID tags. Such current examples of tagging technologies may not however be suitable for some applications. The addition of an RFID tag to certain objects may detract from their aesthetic appearance, for example in the case of jewellery. There are also the practical difficulties in tagging objects with complex shapes or surface textures, the possibility of tags becoming dislodged from the object, and the expense involved in creating or purchasing tags for each physical token.